Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena • Hacker News Board

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#161

Post by raw-23 » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #137

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment. And there you have it. The "money quote" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course the Military / Espionage / Industrial Complex community is going to try to keep paranoia about "UAP's" and "UFO's" stoked... as long as they can use that to justify more $$$ flowing into their coffers. They have to play a delicate balancing…

While you are not wrong about organizations trying to obtain a larger budget, but it it a fallacy to assume a priori this is the case. Regardless, the budget required to research UAPs would be a drop in the bucket for what is spent on defence. There are much more efficient ways to attract tax payer money.

Contrarily if they truly are observing things they cannot explain should there not be money allocated towards researching this? If not only for air safety of the pilots and crew.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#162

Post by jablongo » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #137

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment. And there you have it. The "money quote" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course the Military / Espionage / Industrial Complex community is going to try to keep paranoia about "UAP's" and "UFO's" stoked... as long as they can use that to justify more $$$ flowing into their coffers. They have to play a delicate balancing…

While I agree w/ you that the Military Industrial Complex as an entity will do almost anything to justify increasing funding, I think this is a cynical take on this particular issue and is attempting to explain something we don't fundamentally understand with something we do - military budget increases. Unless the DoD fabricated the videos, and duped radar operators and pilots, or faked the whole thing in some way, this is a seriously interesting phenomenon ...regardless of whether it aligns with the military's insatiable appetite for more funding. Remember, Luiz Elizondo resigned because the ATAP program had insufficient funding (22M) given what he thought he was uncovering.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#163

Post by jablongo » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:51 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #137

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment. And there you have it. The "money quote" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course the Military / Espionage / Industrial Complex community is going to try to keep paranoia about "UAP's" and "UFO's" stoked... as long as they can use that to justify more $$$ flowing into their coffers. They have to play a delicate balancing…

It's also wrong to characterize is as fear mongering, since most people who are seriously pushing disclosure for this stuff are more likely driven by curiosity and accountability than fear. Ironically, Mick West, one of the most well known skeptics on this topic, had a paralyzing fear of aliens as a child...

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#164

Post by shdh » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

codezero wrote: post #84

I’m surprised nobody has suggested that these phenomenon could be an advanced electronic interference platform and that they may be able to interfere with the computing systems of multiple remote sensing systems at once.

Doesn't explain visual confirmation by pilots.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#165

Post by jablongo » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

tailspin2019 wrote: post #34

ALittleLight wrote: post #30

This seems awfully brief and doesn't have much detail. The tittle says it's a "preliminary" report. Is this the expected UAP report or just a preliminary document about it? I would want to see summary statistics for each reported incident and descriptions of the most compelling phenomenon. This document raises a lot of questions and answers few. The document says they have 21 reports of UAP that "appear to demonstrat…

> I'm also not really impressed by their idea to use "advanced algorithms" and "machine learning". Are UFO encounters so frequent we need to resort to big data? I had that same thought - on first read this report seems to contain summary analysis of 144 UAP incidents. Not the sort of numbers that immediately make me think "I need ML to process those!"

I think one proposal is to have advanced wide-field cameras placed in "locations of interest". This would be much like an optical observatory and would generate petabytes of data.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#166

Post by giantrobot » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #149

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #143

Am I the only one who’ve been noticing a shift of narrative regarding UFOs in the past few years? I wonder what the endgame is…

Its part of some deliberate disinformation campaign. All the videos released thus far have been thoroughly debunked by the likes of thunderf00t. If there are non-debunked videos, I am not aware of them. Most of the news coverage involves Lt. David Fravor, Bob Lazar or Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. Why this stuff is being leaked? I cannot fathom. I assume we are signaling to some foreign entity our ability to track i…

> I assume we are signaling to some foreign entity our ability to track items as small as birds

This strikes me as the most likely scenario. While large (small plane size) military drones have been around for decades much smaller (bird size) ones have begun to proliferate. These small drones don't have the duration or capabilities of larger ones but they're good enough for a lot of tasks.

They're made of composites and small enough they're not going to show up well on civilian primary radar. Even some military primary radars might miss them or at least have limited detection ranges.

Someone using such small drones might act a lot more provocatively towards the American military because they think they're not being seen. At least more provocatively than if they only had larger drones or manned aircraft.

So leaks showing those drones can be detected and tracked. It's a subtle "we can see you, you're not as clever as you think". The US doesn't want some overzealous PLAN (or whomever) drone pilot doing something stupid requiring a military response.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#167

Post by DoreenMichele » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #137

Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment. And there you have it. The "money quote" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course the Military / Espionage / Industrial Complex community is going to try to keep paranoia about "UAP's" and "UFO's" stoked... as long as they can use that to justify more $$$ flowing into their coffers. They have to play a delicate balancing…

You are accusing the government of intentionally "stoking" paranoia for publishing their data. Elsewhere in this same discussion, someone is promoting their theory that publishing it on a Friday is designed to intentionally get as little press coverage as possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27636564

Maybe it's just data gathered for security reasons and published in a somewhat sanitized format to satisfy public interest in the data while protecting national security.

The government publishes a lot of data. It's the public that makes the few anomalies in this particular data set into some kind of weird thing for reasons the government cannot control no matter how carefully they frame the whole thing.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#168

Post by user-the-name » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 12:00 AM UTC

marc_io wrote: post #111

colechristensen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Vallee, but after being briefly in the defense industry, reading much, and having some experience with aerospace everything seems to fit very well into one of three categories 1) known US aircraft activity either simply misinterpreted or kept secret from the public or even most of the military apparatus, sometimes strongly denied either as a way to disseminate vague information to adversaries or mi…

“The thing to notice is cameras have become much more prevalent and much higher resolution, but "UFOs" in pictures haven't.” Just two examples of high resolution UAP videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBQ1Ftj4hPE&ab_channel=OrdoN... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVmGhxYrkug&t=0s&ab_channel=... The problem is not resolution per se, but the fact that is quite easy nowadays to manipulate images and videos (I'm no…

They're not fake, they're just two videos of an insect flying past a drone.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#169

Post by lend000 » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #158

lend000 wrote: post #78

From a first skim, it looks intentionally vague and noncommittal, and in classic form, released on a Friday afternoon to minimize coverage. Also of note: there was no input at all drawn from the CIA, which is the agency most frequently associated with the topic for a variety of reasons, aside from the Air Force. "The majority of UAP data is from U.S. Navy reporting [i.e. not in-the-know] , but efforts are underway to…

it looks intentionally vague and noncommittal, and in classic form, released on a Friday afternoon to minimize coverage. As a guess, they do that both because this is information gathered for security reasons and there are limits to what they can reasonably say without compromising security and because no matter how they write it it turns into wild speculation about aliens by the general public and conspiracy theorie…

"Security reasons" doesn't pass the smell test -- US adversaries are going to see the report regardless of what time it's released, whereas significantly fewer of its own citizens will.

> That stuff even creeps into HN discussion in a way and to a degree that is not the norm here.

HN discussion isn't some sacred thing, and probably never was. This is an interesting topic (and depending on the true nature of it, arguably the most interesting topic) and there's plenty of information to sift through. If HN discussions were meant to be stifled around official, manicured government and corporate press releases, that sounds more like naïveté than a free thinking scientifically-minded forum. Some of us are interested in other things besides the most elegant possible Haskell one-liner.

Re: Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

#170

Post by jablongo » Sat, Jun 26, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

dadver wrote: post #157

f02a wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think too often UFO debates become too "either or". People will say "it can't be aliens; it's advanced technology from Russia or China!" In all cases... why not both? I think we should open our minds to all the possibilities. I think it's unlikely that humans are "special". There are billions of possibilities regarding how life could have evolved elsewhere. (And that's not even considering panspermia theories; it c…

>I think there is likely to be a wide variety of life. I think there are probably other human-like life forms in the universe, just as there are probably life forms that are so different that they might resemble ghosts and angels to us. >Anyway, some life in the universe might be more easily anthropomorphized in this way. I completely agree. >What if we're being visited by multiple types of interstellar life? Sure, t…

If you assume (without much evidence) that these are Von Neumann probes I think it's likely that there would be multiple types from different sources.